LC 02 - Questionable Remains (12 page)

Lindsay said nothing. There was nothing she could say;
there was no argument to counter his. There was only this
feeling in her heart of wanting to know about them.

"Think about it, Lindsay Chamberlain. At least do that,"
he said.

"I will." Lindsay laid a hand on the door between them.
"Don't you want to know about them?"

"I know what I need to know."

"That isn't what I asked. Wouldn't you like to have the
sites definitively connected to modern-day tribes?"

"We are connected. Who else are we related to?"

"You know what I mean. There are many tribes and many
sites. Will you think about it?"

"Fair enough. It is also fair that I tell you that I won't
change my mind on this." He started his truck, waiting for
her to get in her Rover before he drove onto the road.

Lindsay walked to her Land Rover and climbed in. She
had certainly made a lot of enemies in the past few months
simply by doing her job. Maybe she was arrogant and
manipulative. Maybe she should rethink her philosophy.
Maybe bones didn't speak to her. Maybe she was wrong.
She turned the key and followed John to Caleb's.

Caleb's was a combination grocery, garage, and gas station. Lindsay bought gas, filled her ice chest, and picked up
a few snacks for the road. John took her tire to the mechanic on duty for her.

"Caleb has a spare tire that'll fit your Rover," John told
Lindsay as she loaded up her supplies. "He's putting it on the wheel now. You need to get another one when you can,
but this will do for now."

"Thanks," she said. "I appreciate your help."

John looked into her eyes for a moment, then at her
Atlanta Braves baseball cap. He took it off her head and
threw it into the trash. Lindsay stood openmouthed while
John went to his truck and came back with a West Builders
cap and put it on her head. He went back to his truck,
climbed in, and drove off.

Esteban Calderon had fled the massacre, stopping only to pick up
the men who guarded the provisions and the last two of the valuable pigs they had begun with. He had pushed his men hard, wan ting to get far from the area, afraid that Piaquay might somehow
send a plea for help to an ally village, that Indian reinforcements
might attack and defeat his men in their weakened condition.
Finally, Diego, an old family friend, had forced Calderon to stop
and rest.

"The men can go no farther, estan cansados," Diego implored.
"They need to heal their wounds. You are getting a fever, Don
Calderon. We'll be safe here in these mountains. I have found a
shelter. There is water nearby. We can camp there and be safe."

The rock shelter was like a small cave, ten feet by twenty feet,
with a stream nearby. Diego cleared a place toward the cooler rear
of the shelter for Calderon to rest while the men, wounded, hungry, and irritable, made camp. At least the mountains were cooler, but the thick green flora everywhere and the damp humus smell
were suffocating. The cries of the birds were strange and eerie to
their ears. Indians signaled to each other by mimicking the birdcalls, so the Spaniards were never sure whether the cries were from
birds or from their enemy. Diego made the decision to kill one of
their remaining pigs. Good food would calm their nerves and make
them cheerful or, at least, not mutinous.

Calderon experienced more searing pain than lie had ever
known. He sat under the shelter of rocks on a bed of leaves and
blankets, wheezing the thick air of the deep forest, tasting the foul
taste of the weeping, infected wound in his mouth. He had lost
nearly all his upper back teeth, some at the time of the injury, others one by one, pushed out by the inflammation. The only merciful thing about his injury was that the arrow had miraculously
grazed only the top of his tongue, rather than severing it. The
aroma of a pig cooking met his nostrils and brought with it a new
wave of pain as his mouth responded to the memory of succulent
meat. He groaned.

Diego brought a fresh warmed cloth to lay over his face.
Diego's old hands were deft and gentle. The warmth soothed
Calderon enough that he could concentrate on his hatred.
Sacrilego pagano, he thought. These savages knew nothing of
the value of gold and silver. They only knew to pound it into
ornaments. Salvajes, estupidos. Valuing their gold trinkets
more than their own families. He showed them. He wasn't finished showing them.

Diego brought him a drink, an opiate for pain, something he
had learned from the Indians in his campaign with Pizzaro.
"Toma," commanded Diego.

Calderon sipped the bitter drink as best he could. It was only a
little better than the repugnant taste already in his mouth.

"Es malo," rasped Calderon.

"Necesitas cura de reposo," said Diego. "Rest."

The drink helped the pain, and made him drowsy, but it also
gave him enlightenment. Eso es, thought Calderon. Es claro. It
was Roberto. I should not have trusted him. Roberto gave
the savages the wrong message in order to stop me, Esteban
Calderon, from getting my treasure. That was it. I should
not have told him I married Cristina. That was a mistake.
Roberto knows where the treasure is hidden. He has lived
among them so long. He wants it for himself. But he's dead now, dead and rotting on the ground. Or is he? "Diego," he
called out, and coughed.

Diego rushed to his side. "LQue necesita, Don Calderon?"

"Roberto," whispered Calderon in his garbled speech. ",Se
murtio? Did you see hint die?"

"No. He did not die immediately. He was injured. He is probably dead now."

"Vive," Calderon whispered so lightly that Diego barely heard
hint. El Sabe, thought Calderon. "He knows where the gold is."

Lindsay bought a new tire in the next town before she
resumed her drive into the mountains. The higher elevations brought cooler temperatures and some relief from the
heat. She had turned off her air-conditioning and rolled
down her windows to listen to the sounds of the mountains, the streams that flowed down the hillsides, the birds,
the wind as she drove. She heard these things, but saw little of the holly, Cherokee roses, laurels, and magnolias that
grew in great abundance in the mountains. Her mind was
on the conversation she'd had with John West. She wondered if John would agree to having the burials excavated
under his tribe's control or if his opposition was too deeply
rooted in his religion. She didn't want to tell him she
wouldn't stop excavating. She couldn't; she did not want to
abandon the quest to discover as much as she could about
the indigenous inhabitants of this continent. Maybe she
could find a compromise.

When Lindsay crossed into the national forest, she pulled
to the side of the road to consult the map Jane had sent her.
In about a mile and a half she should come to the dirt road
that would take her most of the way to the site.

Lindsay found the road. It had a chain across it with a
sign that said the road was closed to the public. Jane's letter
said to drive around the barricade. It was a tight squeeze, but Lindsay drove around and up the winding road. After
five miles of rutted and washed road she spotted a university van, Alan's old '78 Chevy, and a couple of other vehicles parked under a grove of large trees. Lindsay pulled her
Land Rover in between a Ford Explorer and a Jeep
Cherokee. She slung on her backpack, hung the trowel on
her belt, and started the two-mile hike up the trail to the
rock shelter.

The three-foot-wide, well-worn trail inclined gently and
steadily into the forest. She breathed in the fresh air. It
smelled good to her-no odor of exhausts or industry, only
the smells of clean earth and vegetation; no sounds but for
the twittering of birds and the wind in the trees.

She stopped and took a swig of water and continued on,
her hiking boots making a gentle crunching sound on the
trail. After another half mile her legs and back began to feel
the exertion. She stopped, adjusted her pack, and made a
mental note to add a few hills to her jogging route when she
returned home. She rounded a turn and came face-to-face
with Grizzly Adams, or at least someone who looked like
him, dressed in a dirty white T-shirt, cutoffs, and hiking
boots. The shaggy brown beard and long hair made him
look older, but Lindsay guessed he was actually in his midtwenties.

"This trail is not open to the public," he said. "Can't you
read?" He looked down at her belt and spied her trowel. He
obviously thought her to be a pot hunter-here to plunder
the site. She was opening her mouth to speak when he
gripped her arm. "I'm going down the trail. I'll escort you
back."

Lindsay pulled her arm from him, stepped back, and held
out her hand. "I'm Dr. Chamberlain. I believe I'm expected."

He was taken aback for a second, then took her hand and
shook it. "Oh, uh, yes. I'm sorry, Dr. Chamberlain, I thought
you were here looking for artifacts."

Lindsay smiled. "I am, and please, call me Lindsay. Is
Jane close by?"

"She's at the rock shelter," he said.

"I'll go check in with her. What is your name, by the way?"

"Gil Harris. I'm from the University of North Carolina."

"Glad to meet you," she said and continued on her way
up the trail.

Nearer the site, Lindsay saw several more students scattered here and there, working in small excavations in the
woods. The trail ended at a clearing below a rugged rockfaced bluff with a wide gaping hole in the side of the rock
wall. The roof of the rock shelter was a weathered gneiss
overhang that created a room about twenty feet wide and
ten feet deep from front to back. Jane was inside near the
rear of the shelter on her knees, working with her trowel.
Lindsay saw that they had dug two intersecting trenches in
the clearing outside the rock shelter. Each was about three
feet wide and ten feet long, and a couple of students were
working intently on something in one trench.

"Hey, Jane," said Lindsay, walking up to the mouth of the
shelter.

"Lindsay, you're here!" Jane jumped up to greet her. "Did
you have any trouble finding us?" Her blonde hair was tied
in a ponytail. Despite the fact they were working in heavy
shade, Jane's long limbs were tanned.

"No, your directions were very good. What have you got
here?"

Jane's blue eyes glittered. "Some really neat stuff. Digging
is kind of hard with all this vegetation, but using a little
logic, we've been pretty lucky. We're excavating most of the
cave," Jane said, then pointed out into the woods. "We went
over the area with a metal detector and found some interesting things. We're turning up some good refuse pits."

Lindsay laid down her pack by a tree and followed Jane
inside the shelter. Against one wall were two wooden crates
for transporting artifacts. Jane pointed to the boxes.

"We haven't found a large quantity of stuff, but what we
have found is kind of neat: lead balls, iron crossbow bolt
tips, ax heads, and what we think is the trigger mechanism
for a harquebus. In the lower levels of the trenches we think
we've found some Archaic stuff."